Electrical fire erupts in Meyerson Hall office

Four fire engines responded to a call at Meyerson Hall at 8:39 a.m. yesterday to put out a fire in room G-18 of the building, the office of Regional and City Planning Professor Seymour Mandelbaum. The fire was caused by a "printer that was left running," Fire and Occupational Safety Director James Miller said yesterday. The printer burst into flames at approximately 8:30 yesterday morning. Mandelbaum said he "didn't remember leaving the printer on" when he was in his office last, on Tuesday afternoon, but admitted that it was possible that he forgot to turn it off. Although the computer, printer and typewriter in G-18 were destroyed by the flames, little damage was done to the rest of Meyerson Hall, according to Graduate School of Fine Arts Dean Patricia Conway, whose office is in the building. She added, though, that the lower gallery in Meyerson "smelled like kippered herring" for the rest of the day because of the fire. Firefighter Michael Leak said the printer explosion was only a "box," or a "one-alarm fire," because "the fire was confined to that particular room." He added that it was "under control" by 8:49 a.m. yesterday, just 10 minutes after the four fire engines and two ladder trucks pulled up on 34th Street. But Miller said the entire building could have exploded "had it not been for early discovery." He said Physical Plant worker Donald Cal Cagni and two housekeeping employees discovered the fire shortly after it began to rage. They attempted to put out the fire with a hose before calling the Fire Department, Miller said. One housekeeping employee became sick with smoke inhalation. University Police escorted the employee to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to be treated with oxygen. While Housekeeping Site Manager Bart McLaughin lauded the employees' efforts to extinguish the fire as "heroic," he said he was worried that they "could have been injured." "I don't like anybody put in harm's way," he said. Firefighter Bernard Booker, who helped put out the fire, agreed that the housekeeping employees had put themselves in danger. Because the door to the inflamed room was locked, Booker said the employee put her safety at risk by opening it when she saw the smoke, because "she didn't know what was behind that closed door."